Shelley (en)corporated: The romantic sublime and middle -class subjectivity in the Victorian domestic novel

Stephen Eric Hancock, Purdue University

Abstract

The principle aim of this dissertation is to examine the ways that the aesthetic of the sublime is integral to shifts in the organization of power from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Following the trajectory of the romantic aesthetic of the sublime from the treatises of Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into the works of William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, this project demonstrates that the sublime mode was part of a transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle-classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle-class is normally seen as beautiful, it is the claim of this study that the moral authority of the middle-class woman is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity's masculine character. Thus, rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime is a divided aesthetic that marks the transition to a new system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Plotnitsky, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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